Thursday, February 9, 2012

Alright, Jeremy Lin is now my favorite basketball player

On Tuesday, a netizen called Chinese Brocade posted on a Baidu forum: "If Lin Shuhao scores more than 20 points next game, I'll eat a basketball."

Jeremy Lin, yesterday, scored 23 points and dished a career-high 10 assists. The Knicks, playing without their two biggest stars not named Jeremy Lin (Carmelo Anthony and Amare Stoudemire), beat the Wizards 107-93, and Lin has now officially won over everybody.

"Hurry and upload the video of you eating the basketball," wrote hivi_hui this morning.

State-owned People's Daily ran a story from Southern Daily under the headline "Jeremy Lin again Mr. Clutch."

Check out the following video of his game vs. the Nets earlier this week. If you enjoy basketball, do check all of it out:

At around the 4:40 mark, Lin puts his palms together and almost does a traditional Chinese "thank you" to teammates on the bench.

Watch the move at 6:15, when he slices through two defenders, glides to the basket and then converts the and-1. Look at how happy everyone is.

He said all the right stuff afterwards, too.

This is an incredible underdog story, and it pretty much doesn't need to be mentioned that Lin just happens to be Chinese American, and blogs in Chinese on QQ.

But, well, he is -- a huayi, as Chinese call it (ethnic Chinese living abroad): still one of them. CCTV will surely have the next Knicks game. If they don't, it's because someone's worried that the commentators may utterly lose their shit.